Apple to launch 24 bit lossless downloads
Discussion
I know a number of regular posters will be interested in this:
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/02/22/24.bit....
In short, Apple seem to be negotiating with record labels to supply them with not just lossless audio for downloads, but 24 bit audio.
Is this the tide turning for the technology to lend itself back to the quality of reproduction again...?
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/02/22/24.bit....
In short, Apple seem to be negotiating with record labels to supply them with not just lossless audio for downloads, but 24 bit audio.
Is this the tide turning for the technology to lend itself back to the quality of reproduction again...?
Jobbo said:
I am intrigued - while I welcome 24 bit because it will (hopefully) mean an end to overly compressed music, I can't understand why Apple are planning to miss out lossless 16-bit stuff and go straight for 24-bit. Will they be doing 24/192?
I think it is entirely to get the 'older generation' - by that I mean 25 and above who are used to buying physical media for quality to change their buying habits.I have hundreds of CDs and have downloaded a sum of 4 songs through iTunes. However, if I had the choice of spending £7 on a CD or £7 on a download of 24 bit files, I would take the latter.
I would severely doubt that they would be supplied at 192kHz. The upgrade to 24 bit would make a real difference, at a 50% (or a lot less through a lossless format) file size increase. 192kHz would increase that by a factor of 4.
Without getting too technical, there are practical reasons too, those being that it is actually debated that 192 is any better due to the errors induced by handling in recording, replaying, and crucially timing that amount of data. As such, music mastered at that rate is pretty rare.
IMHO, my money would be on 24bit 48 kHz (or 44.1) as the format going forward. That would give a genuine benefit in reproduction without the associated downsides with the larger file formats.
I think the lazy approach from Apple to get to this point is testament to how many people actually want to buy lossless audio. Many of us would want lossless but not relative to the number of people that are happy with 192 or 256k.
IMHO people generally aren't interested in high quality audio, hence the massive move towards Bose sound docks and micro systems.
I'm over 25 and I'm not interested in downloading music of any kind TBH, not because I'm old fashioned but I still think the humble CD is more versatile.
IMHO people generally aren't interested in high quality audio, hence the massive move towards Bose sound docks and micro systems.
I'm over 25 and I'm not interested in downloading music of any kind TBH, not because I'm old fashioned but I still think the humble CD is more versatile.
JustinP1 said:
I think it is entirely to get the 'older generation' - by that I mean 25 and above who are used to buying physical media for quality to change their buying habits.
I have hundreds of CDs and have downloaded a sum of 4 songs through iTunes. However, if I had the choice of spending £7 on a CD or £7 on a download of 24 bit files, I would take the latter.
I would severely doubt that they would be supplied at 192kHz. The upgrade to 24 bit would make a real difference, at a 50% (or a lot less through a lossless format) file size increase. 192kHz would increase that by a factor of 4.
Without getting too technical, there are practical reasons too, those being that it is actually debated that 192 is any better due to the errors induced by handling in recording, replaying, and crucially timing that amount of data. As such, music mastered at that rate is pretty rare.
IMHO, my money would be on 24bit 48 kHz (or 44.1) as the format going forward. That would give a genuine benefit in reproduction without the associated downsides with the larger file formats.
That's four more iTunes Music Store downloads than me, then I have hundreds of CDs and have downloaded a sum of 4 songs through iTunes. However, if I had the choice of spending £7 on a CD or £7 on a download of 24 bit files, I would take the latter.
I would severely doubt that they would be supplied at 192kHz. The upgrade to 24 bit would make a real difference, at a 50% (or a lot less through a lossless format) file size increase. 192kHz would increase that by a factor of 4.
Without getting too technical, there are practical reasons too, those being that it is actually debated that 192 is any better due to the errors induced by handling in recording, replaying, and crucially timing that amount of data. As such, music mastered at that rate is pretty rare.
IMHO, my money would be on 24bit 48 kHz (or 44.1) as the format going forward. That would give a genuine benefit in reproduction without the associated downsides with the larger file formats.
The reason why I am wondering about 24/44.1 or 24/48 is that they're not particularly widely used formats; 24/88.2 or 24/96 might be more likely than 24/192 - HDTracks is a good example
Considering the data rate for CDs is trivial now, increasing it by 8-9x by going for 24/192 isn't going to be terribly difficult, other than for storage as you suggest. I'm certainly not concerned about errors being introduced
I wonder how much space a losslessly compressed 24/192 track would take up?Jobbo said:
Considering the data rate for CDs is trivial now, increasing it by 8-9x by going for 24/192 isn't going to be terribly difficult, other than for storage as you suggest. I'm certainly not concerned about errors being introduced I wonder how much space a losslessly compressed 24/192 track would take up?
About 300MB a song. I wonder how much space a losslessly compressed 24/192 track would take up?
The issue with timing and errors comes into play when you want to use data streams like that. I've read a lot of agreeing papers which have well argued that increasing the sample resolution past 96k is of no practical benefit, and the stress put on the media (even if that's a HDD), hardware, cabling etc to supply data without jitter 192,000 times a second in practical terms does more damage than benefit. That is of course before you consider the recording facility needed to potentially record 32 or more simultaneous streams that size...
I certainly never record at anything higher than 96k. The benefits just don't stack up.
I'd be happy with 24/48, but 24/96 would be awesome, and would realistically mean that with well recorded music, in almost every situation the resolution of the source material will always be more than a match than the playback system it is played on.
the trouble is, it's not just the compression being removed; it's the way modern music is mixed - bloody awfully.
As it has to be appealing on so many different musical devices from phones to laptops to radios to iphones to whatever, production of most modern music is slammed to the extreme - big bass, big treble. It's bloody horrible. Sampling is used massively too which doesn't help so stuff has been tuned many times over.
I mean, take something like a Muse CD or Gaga or whatever floats your boat, and sit down, shut your eyes and listen to a track off it. Then select something from the 70's for example - Pink Floyds 'The Wall', London Calling by the Clash, Tommy by the Who, Exile by the Stones, whatever. Don't adjust anything and put the CD and play the song. Now compare. The earlier track will probably be quieter but much 'fuller'.
It's hard to know what will reverse the current malaise in the music industry to be honest. Simon Cowell being blown to bits would be a start I suppose.
As it has to be appealing on so many different musical devices from phones to laptops to radios to iphones to whatever, production of most modern music is slammed to the extreme - big bass, big treble. It's bloody horrible. Sampling is used massively too which doesn't help so stuff has been tuned many times over.
I mean, take something like a Muse CD or Gaga or whatever floats your boat, and sit down, shut your eyes and listen to a track off it. Then select something from the 70's for example - Pink Floyds 'The Wall', London Calling by the Clash, Tommy by the Who, Exile by the Stones, whatever. Don't adjust anything and put the CD and play the song. Now compare. The earlier track will probably be quieter but much 'fuller'.
It's hard to know what will reverse the current malaise in the music industry to be honest. Simon Cowell being blown to bits would be a start I suppose.
robsa said:
the trouble is, it's not just the compression being removed; it's the way modern music is mixed - bloody awfully.
I realise my earlier post was ambiguous - it's the dynamic compression which I am hoping will be removed with 24-bit music. I assume that's introduced when it's mastered and converted to 16-bit but we'll see.Justin, 300MB per track sounds like the uncompressed PCM size; even if it compresses to about half that size per track it would still be irritatingly large, slow to download, etc so I suspect 24/192 probably isn't workable. Cheers.
Jobbo said:
robsa said:
the trouble is, it's not just the compression being removed; it's the way modern music is mixed - bloody awfully.
I realise my earlier post was ambiguous - it's the dynamic compression which I am hoping will be removed with 24-bit music. I assume that's introduced when it's mastered and converted to 16-bit but we'll see.Justin, 300MB per track sounds like the uncompressed PCM size; even if it compresses to about half that size per track it would still be irritatingly large, slow to download, etc so I suspect 24/192 probably isn't workable. Cheers.
You are exactly right with the compression aspect. That is not due to mixing, that is controlled mainly in mastering.
To understand why 'modern music' sounds overcompressed means looking at the way the art, and the technology and culture of consumption has related to itself over time.
Throughout all previous time the industry strived to produce the highest fidelity playback possible. Then in the 90's there became a change whereby the sale of singles became more and more important almost as a 'loss leader' to sell more profitable albums.
The industry changed so that the whole marketing focus was around the build up to a single release to get a song as high as possible in the charts in the first week. You get that right, you sell albums, you don't, then you don't. The only way of getting in the charts in the first week was to get heavy radio play in the run up to release, and catch people's attention in a very short period of time and/or a single listening.
In short, you need a song to sound 'huge' and 'jump out' over the radio - because that is what now defines the success of your artist. So you master it and make it as 'loud' as possible. You just have to. The downside is that there is no dynamic range left. And the more discerning listener, at home, on CD, loses out.
What is exciting about this announcement is not the '24 bit' aspect. It is what it means. It is the understanding that due to the way that the music industry has changed again, first week CD single sales no longer define the market - and therefore radio is less of a player.
What this means is a subtle change to get record labels to now consider the financial implications of actually recording things to be listened to again. For example, it would take relatively little extra work for say Coldplay to produce a 'radio mix' for their three singles, but master their album with full dynamic range to take advantage of a financially successful 24 bit format.
- That* is where this bit of news is interesting - the patterns of consumption actually changing the art for the good again.
Certainly sounds like an interesting move, and would see me downloading more from them.
Jobbo said:
Justin, 300MB per track sounds like the uncompressed PCM size; even if it compresses to about half that size per track it would still be irritatingly large, slow to download, etc so I suspect 24/192 probably isn't workable. Cheers.
Just for comparison, i have some 24/192 FLAC. A track lasting for 4:24 is 156MB, one for 19:50 is 734MB.Load of good point in there Justin, in the big push for chart sucess they aimed music at kids who buy singles and kids don't care about the mastering on Justin Beepers latest pop party track.
I've got the classics like Queen, Led Zep and Floyd on 24/96 and they sound gorgeous when led back in the sofa with my eyes shut, but I still buy and get given 128k MP3s from local bands and upcoming DJs. Although you could criticise the quality (which is expected because they were produced on a budget), I'd rather listen to them than a lot of the filler from the charts being sold on iTunes at higher quality.
It's nice to have the choice of quality but most people chose based on the quality of the music itself rather than the quality of the recording and mastering.
I've got the classics like Queen, Led Zep and Floyd on 24/96 and they sound gorgeous when led back in the sofa with my eyes shut, but I still buy and get given 128k MP3s from local bands and upcoming DJs. Although you could criticise the quality (which is expected because they were produced on a budget), I'd rather listen to them than a lot of the filler from the charts being sold on iTunes at higher quality.
It's nice to have the choice of quality but most people chose based on the quality of the music itself rather than the quality of the recording and mastering.
Sonic said:
Just for comparison, i have some 24/192 FLAC. A track lasting for 4:24 is 156MB, one for 19:50 is 734MB.
Do you find the file sizes unwieldy in practice? What do you use to play them?Googling last night revealed that my Squeezebox Touch only goes up to 24-bit/96kHz though it'll downsample from 24/192 at the server end, and the limitation is the TOSLink output.
Jobbo said:
Sonic said:
Just for comparison, i have some 24/192 FLAC. A track lasting for 4:24 is 156MB, one for 19:50 is 734MB.
Do you find the file sizes unwieldy in practice? What do you use to play them?Googling last night revealed that my Squeezebox Touch only goes up to 24-bit/96kHz though it'll downsample from 24/192 at the server end, and the limitation is the TOSLink output.
I play them through my Linn Majik DS/Akurate Kontrol.
p?JustinP1 said:
What this means is a subtle change to get record labels to now consider the financial implications of actually recording things to be listened to again. For example, it would take relatively little extra work for say Coldplay to produce a 'radio mix' for their three singles, but master their album with full dynamic range to take advantage of a financially successful 24 bit format.
The compressed nature of many modern releases is nothing to do with the technical limitations of the medium and entirely down to the manner in which the recordings are mastered. What makes you think that going to a 24bit medium would change that?- That* is where this bit of news is interesting - the patterns of consumption actually changing the art for the good again.
I'm sure there are many examples, but I recall hearing that one Red Hot Chili Peppers CD was not merely compressed, but had sufficient gain applied that the audio was severely clipped. This was not the case on the vinyl version. I do not believe for a minute that this was because they didn't know what they were doing when mastering the digital version this way. This anecdote may mean that a good quality version may be produced for those who are seen to value it, but could also suggest that they will be ready to ruin it should it become the norm.
From a purely technical standpoint there is no practical reason to go beyond 16bit, 48kHz recording for distribution, but if it goes well with the £100/m speaker cable and rose-flavoured mains cable then why not.
TheInternet said:
From a purely technical standpoint there is no practical reason to go beyond 16bit, 48kHz recording for distribution, but if it goes well with the £100/m speaker cable and rose-flavoured mains cable then why not.
I can understand someone arguing against expensive speaker cable, see the speaker cable thread, but arguing against the quality of the track... i just don't understand. 
TheInternet said:
JustinP1 said:
What this means is a subtle change to get record labels to now consider the financial implications of actually recording things to be listened to again. For example, it would take relatively little extra work for say Coldplay to produce a 'radio mix' for their three singles, but master their album with full dynamic range to take advantage of a financially successful 24 bit format.
The compressed nature of many modern releases is nothing to do with the technical limitations of the medium and entirely down to the manner in which the recordings are mastered. What makes you think that going to a 24bit medium would change that?- That* is where this bit of news is interesting - the patterns of consumption actually changing the art for the good again.
I'm sure there are many examples, but I recall hearing that one Red Hot Chili Peppers CD was not merely compressed, but had sufficient gain applied that the audio was severely clipped. This was not the case on the vinyl version. I do not believe for a minute that this was because they didn't know what they were doing when mastering the digital version this way. This anecdote may mean that a good quality version may be produced for those who are seen to value it, but could also suggest that they will be ready to ruin it should it become the norm.
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